Saturday, 10 December 2016

Agreements and disagreements

Today's Dateline Londonwas one of those disappointingly consensual affairs for the most part, given that everyone came from within a narrow section of public opinion.

The first two topics saw everyone taking aim at a rogue's gallery of familiar left-liberal/BBC targets. (I ticked off Trump, Putin, Brexit, social media, the alt-right and Breitbart, Duterte, Boris ("a man with a reputation for being born with a silver foot in his mouth", as Gavin Esler described him) and Mrs May.)

The main disagreement came over the closing question of Mrs Merkel wanting to ban the burqa in certain cases and related questions of Muslim integration (or the lack of it). French secularist Agnes Poirier challenged the dismissive way Gavin Esler had framed the discussion about the burqa ("Do European governments actually have more important things to worry about?"). Former Cameron speechwriter Ian Birrell, in contrast, stood up for Muslims and denounced Islamophobia and Louise Casey's report ("a pretty terrible document") whilst expressing regret that Mrs Merkel is saying such thing given that she's "the best hope we've got".

1 comment:

mr ian birrell said that mr farages remark that russia was provoked in ukraine was "a total or utter lie" the post maidan kiev gov 1.declared intention to join nato 2. proposed complete ban on russian language including in crimea 3. kiev gov declared it's right to give sevastopol naval base to the us navy if it wished to if mr birrell does not recognise these 3 statements as provokative he is retarded or corrupt:yr choice one might have hoped that as chairman of this little group eisler could have refernced those facts.